THE DIVINE FLOW CHART

By PETER F. DRUCKER; Peter F. Drucker has worked as a consultant to churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, and his last novel, ''The Temptation to Do Good'' (1984), was about a crisis in a Catholic diocese.

Published: May 28, 1989

ARCHBISHOP Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church. By Thomas J. Reese. 401 pp. San Francisco: Harper & Row. $17.95.

Many people believe that ''management'' means business management and that it was invented by American corporations in this century. But management is the generic function of all institutions, and it was invented (or discovered) by the Roman Catholic Church in the year 1234. When Pope Gregory IX published the first comprehensive collection of papal rulings on ecclesiastical law that year he established the first code of canon law, which is the first ''management text.'' No other organization to this day equals the Catholic Church in the elegance and simplicity of its structure. There are only four layers of management: pope, archbishop, bishop and parish priest. Armies have 10 layers, and General Motors close to 20. And what in business is called the ''central staff overhead'' - for the most transnational of all organizations and one serving close to a billion members worldwide - numbers 1,500 people in Rome, far fewer than are employed in the headquarters of the large American corporation. Yet, while there are thousands of legal studies of canon law, there have been almost no descriptions of how the organization of the church actually functions.

''Archbishop,'' the result of a study by the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, an American Jesuit who is also trained in the social sciences, and produced with the cooperation of 31 American Catholic cardinals and archbishops, is thus an important first. Thirty years ago, when Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York still dominated the public image of the American Catholic Church, it would have been unthinkable. And though some chapters - the one, for instance, on Catholic Charities and its management - contain more information than lay readers may want, the book is easily readable and free of sociological jargon.

It is not, however, a human interest book. Readers who expect profiles of the American princes of the church will be disappointed. But it gives us the office, the archbishopric, warts and all: the problems, the concerns, the activities and the wide - very wide - range of archdiocesan practices. It also recounts the demands on the archbishop himself, as chief executive officer of a large and complex organization, along with his working day. It is a frank record; anyone who has worked with a major archdiocese would vouch for its authenticity.

What Father Reese reports is a remarkably uneven performance. In one area - the making of crucial decisions about people: archbishops, bishops, parish priests - the American Catholic Church is shown as being vastly superior to any other organization we know, whether the Government, the military, the university or business. The processes both for identifying candidates for these posts and for judging them (practically unchanged since the Council of Trent in the 16th century) have been carefully thought through; they are tested again and again and are, as a rule, scrupulously adhered to. Of course, not every priest elevated to an archbishopric is a great man. And the system tends to err on the side of caution - archbishops and bishops, once appointed, are practically unremovable. But the system is about as effective in keeping out the misfit, the merely brilliant, the merely popular, the clever politician and the courtier as anything designed by human beings is likely to be. And there is far more work done on the development of the church's executives than in the most elaborate management development program in a big corporation or Government agency.

In its day-to-day management, however, the archbishopric, as can be seen from the analyses in this book, is a mess. It is overadministered and undermanaged. There are no priorities, or rather everything is a priority. The response to any new need or problem, it seems, is to establish yet another committee and another bureaucracy, each having the power to say no and none being able to say yes. Everything floats up and lands on the desk of a grotesquely overloaded archbishop. Far too often the question is not ''Is it right?'' but ''How will it look in the papers?'' The archbishop's day starts at dawn with one committee meeting over breakfast and ends, 16 hours later, with another committee meeting. When does the poor man get the time to think, to do his own work, let alone to read, to pray, to meditate? To be sure, the Catholic archdiocese is not alone in being mired in trivia; the large Protestant denominations - the Southern Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists - are similarly afflicted.

The overriding message of the book - whether the author realized it or not - is that the archdiocese, as it stands now, is an anachronism and obsolescent. Father Reese focuses on the archdiocese; he mentions bishops and their dioceses only in passing. Yet even his few references make it clear that the much smaller and far less visible diocese outperforms the glamorous archdiocese. It is more modest, closer to clergy and parishioners, far closer to results - and much farther from Rome. And though smaller than the archdioceses, these bishoprics are big enough to support themselves.

Maybe the cure for the ailments of the overly busy, splintered archdiocese that Father Reese describes in vivid detail is to simplify the Catholic Church's structure even further by taking out one layer - by abolishing the archdiocese. Or the archbishop might be freed from administrative chores and be allowed to concentrate on the one crucial job he does well: finding, developing and selecting parish priests and bishops for the dioceses. Father Reese's noteworthy book is subtitled ''Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church.'' But what it describes is an impotence structure in which first-rate men, the archbishops, are being sacrificed to busyness - to the disregard of elementary management principles. HERO, NERO, ZERO

Jesus Christ would have a hard time fulfilling the expectations that people have for their archbishop. The ideal . . . is a pastorally sensitive administrative genius who can prophetically preach the gospel in a nonthreatening way and provide extensive social services and educational programs at low cost with few bureaucrats. He must govern in a way that is widely consultative, decisive, innovative, collegial, and orthodox, while keeping everyone happy. . . . He must be a holy priest who understands the real world of budgets and finances. He must be loyal to the Holy Father, but he should not be pushed around by the Vatican. He must give every priest the parish he wants and every parish the priest it wants. . . . One archdiocese had a well-loved archbishop who was followed by a tyrant and then by a nonleader. The priests dubbed them, ''Hero, Nero, and Zero.'' . . . When Zero retired, the priests were sorry to see him go as they realized how many things he had permitted. From ''Archbishop.''